Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets (review)

BOOK NOTES fables. Book V, entitled "Fabulas extravagantes" (rendered by the translators as "Fanciful Fables of Aesop"), is composed of fables largely derived from the French fabliaux and folkloric sources. Book VI, "The Fables of Remitius" is a translation of 17 fables of Rinuccio d'Arezzo. Book VII, "The Fables of Avianus," contains 27 fables attributed to Avianus who Uved between the second and fifth centuries. Book VIII, "The CoUected Fables ofAlfonso, of Poggio, and of Others," contains 22 fables. The Alfonso of this section is well known to students of Spanish literature as Petrus Alfonsus, the converted Jew from Aragon who, in the twelfth century, penned the Disciplina Clericalis or Scholar's Guide. The Poggio mentioned in this section is Poggio Bracciolini, author of a popular fifteenth-century fable anthology. Thus the Spanish compüer of the Ysopet strove to pubüsh a complete compendium offables considered, directly or indirectly, to be part of the Aesopic tradition as this corpus was known in fifteenth-century Europe. Keller and Keating provide a very lively and readable translation from the Old Spanish. This version in EngUsh will prove useful to scholars of the fable and medieval brief narrative as well as those interested in early book art and woodcuts. The woodcuts from the 1489 edition are very clearly reproduced in this volume and add a delightful dimension to the narratives. This book wül likewise be of interest to both chüdren and adults as an entertaining compendium of stories that have proved to be of timeless appeal. Connie L. Scarborough University of Cincinnati ROMY HEYLEN. Translation, Poetics, and the Stage: Six French Hamlets. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. ? + 170 pp. The "playwright whose works are performed most often in French theatres is WUUam Shakespeare," writes Romy Heylen (122)—and Hamlet, "the most classic of classic plays," continues its long run, in numerous often radically different avatars (her book includes a useful "Table of Selected Hamlet Productions" in French between 1769 and 1989). But the six versions Heylen studies also serve as demonstrations of a theoretical approach to translation. Arguing against prescriptivenormative , source-text oriented theories of translation, Heylen adopts a socio-cultural, historical descriptive model. Her lucid introduction summarizes the contributions of seven theorists, concluding that translation "should not be seen as a rule-regulated activity"—a question of "good" and "bad"—but as "a decision-making process ... a teleological activity where-by the translator actively intervenes and appropriates the foreign text with a particular objective in mind" (24). Heylen's examination of six staged and variously transformed versions of Hamlet begins with Jean-François Ducis' Hamlet, Tragédie Vol. 19 (1995): 158 THE COMPAKATIST imitée de l'anglois. This version, performed 203 times by the Comédie Française between 1769 and 1851, "naturalized" Shakespeare in "a completely acculturated translation" (41). Ducis observes in alexandrine verse all the tenets of neoclassical taste while introducing elements of contemporary bourgeois drama à la Diderot and Rousseauistic sentiment. In 1847, however, Alexandre Dumas appropriated and reworked a translation ofPaul Meurice, seeking to impose a new version ofthe play that incorporated the Romantic aesthetic and the boulevard techniques of popular melodrama. Subsequent revisions permitted this Hamlet to enter the Comédie Française in 1886, where it played until 1932. The first prose version to be staged in France was La Tragique Histoire d'Hamlet (1889) ofMarcel Schwob and Eugène Morand, which featured Sarah Bernhardt in the title role. This "source text oriented translation" (62) attempted the gageure of a word-for-word scholarly "reclamation" of Hamlet, using archaic French and retaining, where possible, Shakespeare's syntax as well as his exact imagery and vocabulary , sounds, and rhythms. Schwob and Morand thus "historicized" their text but also "naturalized" it at certain points, "coloniz[ing] the past, replacing Shakespeare's 'exotic' allusions with native French ones" (76). In the 1940s André Gide, encouraged by Jean-Louis Barrault, completed his Tragédie d'Hamlet. He sought to "modernize" the play, turning it into a play for the Europe of World War II, so that Barrault (who directed it and played the principal role) saw a Hamlet "torn between doubt and faith," who...